Andrew Cuomo, candidate for mayor of New York City, meet John Carney, mayor of Wilmington, Delaware.
Actually, the two already have met. Cuomo is the former governor of New York, and Carney is the former governor of Delaware. They’ve been at meetings of the National Governors Association at the same time. But one thing is sure: When their gubernatorial jobs brought them together at the state chief executives’ annual summer retreat in Providence, Rhode Island, eight years ago, the two didn’t discuss city sanitation, sidewalk maintenance and tree trimming.
But those topics, and not the international trade and cybersecurity issues on the governors’ agenda that summer, are exactly what now occupy Mayor Carney in Wilmington — and what Cuomo, now running an independent mayoral campaign in New York City, is hoping will be on his daily agenda.
For a governor to seek a mayor’s position — to go from the state capitol and, in Cuomo’s case, the state plane, to a city hall office and late-night calls about road obstructions — is not the normal course of things. Indeed, in modern history, only one person before Carney has deigned to do it: Edmund “Jerry” Brown of California, a confirmed quirky figure who cultivated idiosyncrasies and seemed entirely comfortable, between separate stints as governor of California, as mayor of Oakland.
Cuomo is aiming for Gracie Mansion, the official residence of New York’s mayor, because he’s thirsty for public life after being repelled from the governor’s mansion in Albany. Carney ran for mayor of Wilmington because he was ineligible to run for a third term as governor and craved a chance to make a difference in Delaware’s biggest city.
“In this job, you deal with potholes or a park with grass needing cutting, or new gas lines in homes, or sidewalks and streets that are torn up,” Carney said in an interview. “But at the same time, you can actually get things fixed. It feels like you’re actually doing something.”
That’s what former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey is hoping to do as yet a third former state chief executive seeking a mayor’s office suite this decade.
McGreevey, who left office 21 years ago after an affair with a state employee, is campaigning to be mayor of Jersey City. If he prevails in the nonpartisan general election in November, he’ll find the new job to be substantially different from the old job.
“It took me eight years to understand and deal with the frustrations of the limitations of my authority as governor,” said Carney. “It took me three weeks as mayor to figure out that I had none of the authority I used to have. I can’t call so-and-so and ask them to do something because they don’t work for me anymore.”
Politicians change jobs almost as frequently as running backs change NFL teams.
Another Delawarean, Republican former Gov. Mike Castle, entered the House of Representatives in 1993, a move only two dozen sitting or former governors have made since 1900. Carney went from the House, where he served for three terms in Delaware’s at-large congressional seat, to the governor’s office — so attractive a move that eight of the departing House members in 2018 attempted it.
Among them were Kristi Noem, who became governor of South Dakota and now is secretary of homeland security, and Tim Walz, who became governor of Minnesota and, last year, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee.
One of the more unusual moves came in 1987, when GOP Rep. John McKernan Jr. and Democratic Gov. Joseph Brennan of Maine swapped jobs. (I caught up with the two of them just before the transfer and witnessed McKernan warn Brennan that he was leaving behind a pile of constituent mail to be answered, while Brennan told McKernan that he would have to enter his bedroom in the Blaine House governor’s mansion through the bathroom.)
In truth, the position of mayor of New York has been a Cuomo family preoccupation for nearly a half-century.
Mario Cuomo, the former governor’s father, lost the 1977 New York mayoral race to Edward Koch by 10 percentage points. He recovered by winning the 1982 gubernatorial race with his son as his principal adviser. The elder Cuomo died the day the younger Cuomo was inaugurated for his second gubernatorial term. Andrew Cuomo left office after a series of allegations of sexual misconduct.
As a young man, Carney was marked by a speech Mario Cuomo delivered at Wilmington’s Congregation Beth Shalom, a conservative synagogue where, the mayor recalled, Gov. Cuomo “was able in that speech to combine the elements of the various ethnicities of New York, using the language of those folks.” Carney said the younger Cuomo “has this same quality.”
Andrew Cuomo — channeling Winston Churchill’s 1937 remark that politicians “expect to fail; they hope to rise again” — must defeat Zohran Mamdani, who beat him in the Democratic primary.
“It’s a way different job from being governor,” Carney said. “I think Cuomo would be better as mayor than being governor. He was a good governor and leader during COVID. But to me he’s a product of that New York environment. That’s important in communicating at the local level. It’s different from leading at the state level, where he had to communicate with people in Buffalo and Syracuse.”
Or, as Mayor Brown put it in a 1999 speech to newspaper editors, “People never thought I’d get interested in potholes. But there’s something about a pothole. It’s immediate, it’s real, and you can fix it for very little.”
Moving from governor to mayor, as Cuomo is trying to do, or from the House to governor to mayor, as Carney has done, may seem like downward mobility. But consider this: Three presidents once were mayors — Andrew Johnson (Greenville, Tennessee), Grover Cleveland (Buffalo) and Calvin Coolidge (Boston). And as Carney might tell you, move one step lower to New Castle County commissioner, and you’ll find that title in the resume of one of his Delaware neighbors: Joe Biden.
But forget the White House. Think instead of what Brown told me in the lobby of an Oakland hotel 26 years ago: “Can the president really get kids to do their homework?
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
